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The latest research activities in this field involve the same ablation technologies, but trying to avoid the anesthetic step of this procedure. The successful ablation of these veins require application of temperatures higher than boiling water. And obviously without any anesthetic that will be unbearable to a patient causing skin burns and severe pain and damage to the veins. And so in those lines, there is a step known as tumescent anesthesia, where we inject the entire length of the vein through about seven to 10 needle sticks, injecting cold, normal saline with anesthetic. So patients will not feel the burning that we’re doing inside the vein. And also the idea of infusing that fluid is to make the vein away from the skin. So the heat is not transmitted to the skin avoiding skin damage. And so technology now is trying to avoid those 10 painful needlesticks. And so the research is now geared towards finding intravenous substances, such as cement, foam, or glue, trying to shut down those channels. And doing the exact same thing as we used to do with the vein stripping or hitting the vein with heat is just shutting down the faulty channel. And so that is encountered by some insurance issues with reimbursement and with the fact that the world now is going green, and some people feel that having some exogenous or foreign substance applied to your legs is not a cool thing to have in this day and age, but early results are showing promising results. The time of the procedure is shortened by avoiding the anesthetic steps of the procedure. Those 10 needle sticks are avoided. And so future research is needed to validate these technologies at this time.
